You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

July 26th

Dumb people hurt us because we let them. We give them power, we give them money, we give them acclaim they don’t deserve just because they say mean things about about the dumbass we gave power to. Collectively, we fall for a lot of stupid shit, when we should just realize that IDIOTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS!

“They’re a company that’s really in transition and do things in a very old-school way. But it was amazing to work with Anna. I love her. She’s a total idol of mine. We realized we could just do a better job of it ourselves in-house. I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Condé, understandably, there are a lot of rules.” - Gwyneth Paltrow, explaining the process behind her Goop print magaine.

See, Paltrow wanted to extend her Goop brand of tricking white women with too much money into doing horrible things to their bodies to the print medium, because, well, a lot of the white women with too much money who know how to use the Internet have sent most of their money to Nigerian princes. So she tried to partner with Conde Nast, a company that still thinks people want to buy magazines. But they had too many “rules”.

Those rules, apparently, involved the things said in the magazine by doctors about how various bullshit “treatments” would help you actually being true, and not the ravings of a madman encouraged by someone with a spare trailer of chamomile suppositories from a very unregulated part of the world they needed to unload. But hey, what better story for our times than a rich scam artist attempting to be held to standards only to slip free of the bonds of facts and continue to succeed beyond any reasonable expectation?

"Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left. This president and his Republican Party are counting on you to do exactly that. America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership." - James Comey, vowing never to rest until everyone except David Brooks hates his fucking guts.

The only thing I’m more fucking sick of than Republicans rightsplaining to Democrats “why you lose” or “the only way you can win” is Democrats fucking listening to them. In the case of Comey, I think it’s probably a bad idea for the Left to abandon universal health care just so they can seize center-right power to assuage the guilt of the man who helped get Trump elected and now feels squidgy about it.

Also, FUCK THE GREAT MIDDLE. I say this as someone who is ostensibly part of the Great Middle, except apparently I don’t count as part of the Great Middle because I live in a city with more than one Thai restaurant and therefore I’m an elitist and what I want doesn’t fucking count. You know what the great middle wants? To never argue with a for-profit insurance company over their decision not to cover 90% of the cost of an emergency room visit for some elaborate legal construction that boils down to “We like your money and we wanna keep it.” There’s nothing “ethical” about splitting the difference between rapacious, racist capitalists being blackmailed by Russia and Hillary Clinton and calling it “balance”.

"But the FBI didn’t think it was lying with Paul Manafort, who is a really nice man. You look at what’s going on with him, it’s like Al Capone.” - A Man With An 88% Approval Rating Among Republicans.

I know that there’s a lot going on, and I know that there’s a lot going on all the time, but I think we all, collectively, haven’t given enough attention to the fact that President Donald Trump thinks murderous mobster and notorious old-timey syphilitic criminal Al Capon got treated unfairly when he was busted on tax evasion instead of the many crimes they couldn’t nail him for.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. It totally tracks. Donald Trump is a New York City real estate mogul, for fuck’s sake. There’s no way he hasn’t been mob-adjacent at a bare minimum for most of his life. Plus his general desire to be above the law, plus his general weird fetish for mythologically tough guys. Of course he thinks Al Capone got a raw deal. But it seems like the kind of thing that should be followed up on, not buried so deep you need quotes around shit in a Google search to find it. Just saying.